Founder & CEO at The Hire Effect™
July 16, 2025
(Yes, there’s a difference.)
One of the most common pushbacks I hear when I talk about hiring for culture and skill is:
“But isn’t that how you end up with a cult?”
Fair. The word culture does, after all, contain the word cult, and I get how that might raise red flags. But let’s dig in.
The word culture actually comes from cultivation, the process of growing and tending something with care. And when it comes to building a high-performing team, that’s exactly what we’re doing: intentionally cultivating the conditions for people to thrive, connect, and get meaningful work done.
That’s not a cult. That’s good culture.
But like all powerful tools, if culture gets used without nuance, or with poor definitions, it can absolutely go sideways.
Where Culture-Based Hiring Goes Wrong
There are two big missteps I see:
Mistake 1 | Reducing “culture fit” to sameness
This is where things start to feel cultish. When companies confuse culture with “what people look like” or “where they come from,” the hiring process gets dangerously narrow. That’s not culture fit—that’s homogeneity. And it undermines performance in the long run.
Culture isn’t about appearances or shared backgrounds. It’s about shared commitments to what we care about and collaborative ways of working.
At The Hire Effect, we define culture with just two elements:
- Drivers: What do people care about when they make decisions and design processes?
- Mood: What’s the dominant tone or feeling as people collaborate?
That’s it. Simple, actionable, and inclusive.
When you know the answers to those two questions, you can build alignment—not sameness. You can evaluate whether a candidate will thrive in your team’s natural operating system without replicating everyone else in the room.
The Power of Clarity (and a Quick Thought Experiment)
Let’s say your company trains flight crews. Your team deeply cares about:
- Prioritizing safety
- Genuine care
- Connecting people and places
And the team’s overall mood is:
- Confident
- Collaborative
- Curious
Now imagine every internal meeting, client interaction, and marketing message reinforced those three drivers and that mood. How would it affect:
- The way your team communicates?
- How customers experience you?
- Who is drawn to work there?
Hiring for culture in this case would mean hiring people who are motivated by those drivers and comfortable working in that mood no cloning required.
Mistake 2 | Hiring for comfort, not complement
Here’s the other trap: hiring people who feel like a “fit” without checking whether they bring a different kind of thinking to the table.
One of the most helpful models we use is based on the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI). It maps how people process the world using four core lenses:
- Facts (data-driven logic)
- Form (structures, processes)
- Futures (strategy, vision)
- Feelings (relationships, empathy)
If your team is loaded with people who love structure and form, but no one’s tuned into emotions, outcomes, or facts, you’re going to miss important signals, and likely make poor decisions. (But the slide decks will look fantastic.)
A truly diverse team is a rounded team. You don’t want all the same strengths. You want complementary perspectives that stretch your systems thinking, and challenge groupthink.
So How Do You Hire the Right Fit?
Start by redefining what “fit” actually means.
The right fit is someone who:
- Aligns with what your team cares about
- Can thrive in how your team interacts
- Brings a needed skills and perspective to how you solve problems
That’s how you hire for culture and for diversity of thought. That’s how you cultivate, not clone, a team. And that’s how you grow a business without drifting into cult territory.
If you’re curious what your actual culture looks like—beyond the posters and values statements—we can help.
At The Hire Effect, we offer a culture assessment that maps your team’s current drivers and mood, and helps you close the gap between where you are and where you want to be.
Want to talk about doing one for your team?
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